


The Spirit of the Game

by foolish_mortal



Category: Endgame (TV)
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-06
Updated: 2012-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-29 01:45:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/314497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolish_mortal/pseuds/foolish_mortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danni thought Arkady was creating his own world inside the Huxley and finding people to live there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spirit of the Game

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: the world outside.

"Ugh," Sam said and flopped down next to Arkady at the bar with an ice pack over his eye. Arkady was engrossed in an online chess game and didn't look up, not even when Danni snorted and asked, "What happened to you?"

Sam looked at Arkady and then back to her, probably realising where he had the chance of getting some actual sympathy. She wondered why he always looked at Arkady first. "Ultimate tournament. Man, Columbia plays dirty. Walter got kicked in the head. Maggie and I avenged him." He gestured to his face left-handedly, looking triumphant. "S'where I got this."

"Oh yeah, real manly. Except for the part where you were chasing after a _Frisbee_ ," Danni retorted, but she made up a new ice bag and threw his partially melted one away.

Sam eased the new ice pack onto his swollen cheek with a hiss. "You know, Ultimate is tougher than you might think. There's—"

"I'm riveted," Danni drawled. She began wiping the counters down. "Arkady, I'm off in a few minutes. You need anything?"

Arkady made a noncommittal noise and kept playing. She rolled her eyes and began cleaning up the empty glasses on the other side of the bar. Stock market traders. Came in every week like clockwork and drank like alcohol was going out of style, but they always left a hell of a tip.

"Actually, I could use a beer," Sam ventured, a hesitant smile wavering at his mouth.

"You sure you're old enough to drink?" she teased but got him a bottle of Molson and began to tidy up the counter around Arkady. She lifted up his bowl of pickles to wipe under it, but he suddenly took it from her.

"Leave my pickles," he said without tearing his eyes away from the computer screen.

"Whatever," she said and ducked out of the bar. She rolled her ankles and felt them pop. This was the last time she was doing extra hours for Barbara. She didn't care if the bar was understaffed; the Huxley could just stand to hire some help. "You know, I hate you guys sometimes," she said, perching on the stool next to Arkady and toeing off her heels. "There is no way you need all those extra amenities in your rooms. Maybe if the Huxley stopped shelling out for bonbons, I could get some help around here."

"It's _Swiss_ chocolate," Arkady agreed with a disdainful curl of his lip. He leaned sideways without breaking his concentration. "Sam!"

Sam obediently took a pickle from the dish and popped it into Arkady's mouth. Arkady crunched on it with vicious relish.

That didn't process for a minute. "Really?" she asked finally. "Did you just do that?" She stared at Sam, who didn't make eye contact. "Jeez, you're like his little minion, or something."

"My hands are busy playing chess. Sam!" Arkady barked again.

"Yes, master," Sam crooned in a credible Igor voice and popped another pickle into Arkady's mouth. He ducked a little closer to peer at the screen. "Heier again? I'm starting to recognise his style."

"Heier, Gregorovitch, Warring, and Tang," Arkady corrected and crunched into the pickle again like it had personally offended him.

"Wait, you're playing four people?" Danni demanded. "For real?"

A smirk wavered at the corner of Arkady's mouth for a moment. "You didn't think I paid this much attention to one person all at once, did you?"

And no, she knew Arkady didn't. Not since Rosemary. She had seen them in the Orchid Room one night, the way he had followed her with his eyes and didn't seem to register the rest of the world. That was before she had even known Arkady; they had just been another couple having a few drinks, and even then she wondered at the kind of woman that could hold a man's attention so long and so intensely. The only thing that seemed to hold Arkady's attention to any comparable degree now was chess, and even that seemed more like an obsession, like it was all he could ever look at and if he ever tore his gaze away, he would only see fire and bullet holes and the ruins of a black Lexus.

"Oh," Sam said excitedly. "You've got Gregorovitch? Oh, and Cooper."

"Who _are_ all these people?" she demanded, though she had a fair idea from the way Sam's eyes were shining. Not for the first time, she thought he would have been sort of attractive if he hadn't been such a total geek.

"Hush," Arkady said. "I am earning your pay."

" _My_ pay," she repeated. "I haven't seen a dime go into my wallet so far."

"Oh, _nice_ ," Sam breathed, staring at the screen now too. He and Arkady almost looked alike as the stared at the laptop with the glare of the online game reflecting in their eyes. She wondered if Arkady had been like Sam once. If he had been young once.

"I will never understand chess players," she sighed. "You're like a different breed of animal. I should start a documentary." She lowered her voice dramatically. "And here we have the grandmaster in his natural habitat."

"There, you've got him!" Sam said, totally oblivious. He fumbled for his beer by touch and lifted it to his mouth, but before he could take a sip, Arkady suddenly reached out and took it from him.

"No drinking at a time like this, Samuel," he scolded. "I have a job for you."

Sam perked up immediately, as if Arkady hadn't just stolen an entire bottle of beer from him. "What? A job?"

"Yes," Arkady said. He raised his eyes, and Danni saw Hugo making his way across the room. "Here we have bumbling hotel security in his natural habitat, looking for innocent Russians to persecute. Beat Tang for me, Sam."

And with that he was gone, darting under the table and out the door like a ninja. Hugo barked out something about late rent and chased after him.

"Wait!" Sam shouted, already scrambling with the laptop. He dropped the ice pack to stab at the keys, and the pack fell somewhere under his chair with a wet plop. Danni eyed its trajectory and decided she wouldn’t be bothered to get it. She was off the clock, godammit.

"He just stole all of your beer," she decided to point out.

"Uh, yeah," Sam said, his eyes flicking from the keyboard to the screen. He licked his lip and shifted the screen up. "Okay," he said and breathed out of his mouth a few times like an athlete psyching up for a game. "Okay."

"This is a big deal for you, isn't it?" she asked, propping her chin in her hands to enjoy the spectacle.

"Well, yeah," Sam said. He typed briefly and then clicked. "Tang is…well, Tang is just…I don't know how to—"

"Then don't," she interrupted. She laced her fingers together and stretched. She heard something in her back pop and wondered if it was bad to feel this old so soon. She decided to blame Sam's proximity. She wondered if he would ever get old.

She watched him play for a little bit and saw how his eyes never left the screen, like he was in love. Falling in love with something so utterly was only the right of the particularly naive, and she suddenly wished she could feel like that again. But instead she had grown up too fast and fallen in love with people and screwed it up. It was no use falling in love with people first, because they didn't have the patience and compassion of inanimate things. She thought Arkady had been very lucky, finding his first love in chess.

But perhaps there was something to be said about loving people. There were subtle lines between devotion and obsession, and it was far too easy to convince yourself that they were the same thing. It had only been through people, through the marriage and divorce, that she had understood that. She wondered if Sam would ever know the difference, if he would ever separate Arkady the man and Arkady the grandmaster.

"Hah!" Sam burst out, and she jolted awake, only realising belatedly that she'd been drifting off.

"What?" she muttered and knuckled her eyes, probably smearing her eye-liner, but she didn't care. "Who?"

"I beat Tang," Sam announced, beaming. She felt an unbidden rush of affection for him. "I can't believe it!"

"That was fast."

"It's blitz chess." He pumped a fist. "I beat Tang at blitz chess."

"What do you want, a prize or something?" she muttered, trying to stifle something that felt horrifyingly like a smile.

"I think I'll have that beer," he declared, grinning and tucking his hands behind his head.

"Take it up with Yi Min," she said, jerking her chin towards the new woman staffing the bar. Yi Min gave Sam a look that clearly said she wasn't going to get around to his part of the bar anytime soon.

Sam ducked his eyes back to her. "I, uh, I don't suppose you could…"

"Uh uh. No way. Off the clock means off the clock," she sing-songed.

He raised his eyebrows. "You'd do it for Mr. Balagan."

She sighed and examined her bare toes. "Yeah, well. Guess he just brings out the worst in me."

"In all of us," Sam agreed, probably thinking about all the times he'd ditched classes to help Arkady on a case.

But she thought Sam brought out the worst in Arkady too. Arakdy was always bullying him, sending him off on wild chases, and calling him at random hours in the night. She wondered if Arkady thought getting rid of Sam would let him stay inside the Huxley forever.

"Why do you help him?" she asked.

Sam shrugged. "Because he needs my help. To get better."

"Get better," she repeated. "How long will you wait around for that?"

Sam stared at the laptop and didn't answer. "Listen, the thing about Arkady is—"

"I am gone for ten minutes, and already you're gossiping about me," Arkady said, returning abruptly with Pippa in tow. He snapped his fingers. "Pippa. Drink."

"Oh, fine," Pippa said. "Hi, Sam."

It was the first time Danni had seen her without her stacks of case files or her laptop, and she wondered there had been a breakthrough in Rosemary's case. She only ever quantified Pippa in terms of Rosemary's investigation, and she wondered if Pippa was really fine with letting Rosemary consume her entire life. Certainly she never spoke of her, and from Arkady's anecdotes of travelling around Europe, she wondered how much time Pippa and Rosemary had really spent together.

She could imagine a younger Pippa feeling left behind with her elder sister so wrapped up with Arkady. Perhaps investigating Rosemary's murder was the only way Pippa knew to feel close to her. Arkady tended to monopolise people, hoard their time for himself and let them be isolated from the rest of the world. No wonder he had become an agoraphobe after Rosemary had left him; it had only been a matter of time.

Arkady didn't want the outside world with all its dangers and uncertainties. He was trying to build a false world inside the hotel and find citizens to live there. She thought that it was a very good thing Alcina had her children and Pippa had her blog, or Arkady would have claimed them all like Sleeping Beauty trapping her people with her inside the castle. But Sam had chess, and that was his weakness for Arkady to exploit. In her opinion, he spent far too much time at the Huxley.

Danni eyed the string of them sitting at the bar. "Are you guys here for a case?" she asked. Arkady did very well with assembling his little team when he needed them. Unfortunately, sometimes that included her too, whether she liked it or not.

"We're waiting for Alcina to finish her shift," Pippa said. She leaned over and retrieved the melted bag of ice from underneath her chair. "Hey, Sam, is this yours? You did great today, by the way."

Arkady looked confused, as if he couldn't fathom that people had lives outside of the Huxley, lives that had nothing to do with him. "You went to his Ultimate game?"

Huh, Danni thought. Maybe Arkady did listen when Sam talked.

Pippa was nodding. "Yeah. I saw him hit that guy in the ribs."

Arkady looked surprised and then proud. "You injured someone, Sam?"

"Elbow to the torso," Sam said matter-of-factly. "I was blocking a shot. Didn't realise he was behind me, whoops." Arkady grinned at him, and Sam grinned shyly back, unused to praise.

"Hey," Yi Min said and finally walked around to Sam. "What did you want?"

Sam stared at her. "Uh."

"Nothing, thank you," Arkady interrupted. He snapped open the laptop before Sam could open his mouth. "Sam, chess while we wait?"

Sam's eyebrows rose, and he forgot all about the beer. "How many games?"

Arkady shrugged. "As many as you like, as long as you are not dull."

Sam's looked suspicious. "Why?"

"Because I am bored," Arkady snapped. "You ask too many questions."

Sam grinned at him unrepentantly, and Danni wondered what Arkady was going to do once he figured out nothing he did would drive Sam away. She watched both of them play, Sam's attention on the laptop and Arkady's gaze anywhere else. Arkady never looked at Sam more than he had to. He was always turning away to busy himself with drinks and pickles and Russian platitudes. Sometimes he seemed to disconnect himself entirely, as if he was stepping into a completely different part of his brain where none of them existed.

But she knew Arkady stole looks at Sam in the long quiet spaces when Sam stared at the chessboard and struggled to keep his head above water. She wondered what he saw when he looked at Sam: not chess and certainly not a car shrouded in fire. Arkady studied Sam like he was a game theory concept he was trying to figure out when he still didn't know the players and what choices they would make. She wondered what would happen the day Sam improved, the day he stopped keeping all of his attention on the board and began stealing looks back. She wondered if there would be a day they would just stare at each other across the board and never even touch the pieces. Chess players in their natural habitat.


End file.
